Oppositional behavior anyone?

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My son is turning 9, in grade 4, not diagnosed but suspected Aspergers.

He had a good first two weeks of school, third week was a bit rougher, this week they are seeing the true self emerging. He is refusing to do his work when asked by the EA and the teacher. He has ripped up a page of his planner and defaced the front of it with permanent marker. He has picked apart his calculator. When asked to do his spelling test corrections he ripped up the paper and threw it away, then avoided bringing home a new sheet of paper to complete the test again.

this was happening last year, the work would be sent home, he would do it for me here, but it is not always coming home this year.

He is not sleeping well at night, we are adjusting the time he is taking his meds, and changing the melatonin to a time release tablet. He is napping at school, usually after refusing to do work, he has a short nap 15-30 minutes, gets up, says he is ready to work and does the work!

Teacher is wondering about ODD. I just completed Conner's parent scale - he barely rates in the atypical range for Oppositional, like 61, threshold for clinical is 70. He does not rate for ADHD, but does (barely) for anxiety, and hugely for social concerns and psychosomatic concerns. Other rating scales completed in the past do not rate clinical for ODD or ADHD.

I talk about this with my son and we can have a pretty good conversation, he says his brain keeps telling him "no" even though he doesn't want it to? He says when he sleeps he feels better. I did sit down with him and do some "reflecting" on his school - writing down Things that Make me Happy at School; Things that Make Me Unsure at School; Things that Make me Sad at school; and Things that Make me Mad at School. His EA is on the mad list

Lots of things going on at school - grade three to grade four is a big jump and as far as I know there is no allowance for using the computer for writing/spelling and I am not sure the work is being modified to a great degree; the teacher is really trying to set some ground rules and structure which I support, but he and the aide are admittedly having a difficult time trying to figure out when to back off on the requests. Also his one and only friend is branching out and playing much much less with my son, which is leading to some difficult times.

I am also talking with him about the importance of respect and the importance of respecting his teacher and aide. I have admitted that sometimes we adults don't always make the best decisions, however we are always working to try and figure out how to help our kids.

I just think there is some underlying stuff going on that is resulting in the refusal. It is not in his nature to just defy for the sake of defying, but maybe I'm biased? I do follow through with everything at home. He has expectations on his behavior and there are consequences (loss of computer time) when those expectations are not met.

A comment was made to me that AS kids aren't typically oppositional...thoughts?

Any suggestions/thoughts you wonderful parents (and individuals) could provide would be super helpful.

cutiecrystalmom

oh asd kids can definitely be oppositional, but its usually not for the same reasons that kids with odd are.

my middle son is not dx asd, but he has a few traits of asd and ocd. we have to be careful with him tho because if he gets tired or hungry, he turns into a monster. he is my mostly nt son and he has meltdowns much more often than his autie little brother, almost always when tired or hungry. for some kids, and this rings true with some asd kids, when something is off like if they are overly tired, they simply cant cope. their ability to handle the sensory/social stimulation just goes out the window and they enter meltdown mode.

i am not saying your sons refusals are due to tiredness, but its worth looking into, especially if you know he isnt sleeping well at night. another reason for the naps could actually be the refusals, as overloads and meltdowns are very draining for our kids and can be a cause of tiredness.

are the work refusals happening at a particular time of day? or after a certain class or activity? if they are at a predictable time perhaps the school could try to give him a quiet activity or rest period to recharge and hopefully avoid reaching the refusal point.

I would say that my daughter is definitely oppositional. Until she went to school last year, this was our main concern. It's the main difference between her and myself at her age (I was the exact opposite in that respect).

When we are getting ready in the morning, she just doesn't get dressed at all. I could ask her 50 times and she still wouldn't do it. She doesn't say, 'No, I'm not gettting dressed', she just continues with whatever she wants to do (usually playing with lego, drawing a picture, etc). In the end, I often take charge of the dressing (or more often actually dress her) and she complies. There are a lot more things that she does, but the list is 2 pages long.

Before ASD was on the cards, I'd looked into all sorts of reasons for her behaviour. One thing that did ring a few bells was something called PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance), which is a a pervasive development disorder. But, now Aspergers is the most likely explanation for everything, although she does have ADHD traits too (to a lesser extent). There are sensory reasons behind a lot of it, difficulty with going from activity to another (or being drawn away from an activity that she's enjoying) and, as azurecrayon says, tiredness plays it's part too.

My daughter is extremely oppositional, especially after school when she is at overload. Thankfully, at school, she is shy, withdrawn and compliant (most of the time). But at home she will rip up homework, throw a book across the room, etc. I think she's just had ENOUGH of school by that point and just cannot be compliant when she feels so worn out.

My son was first diagnosed with ODD....when we handled his behaviour as ODD, it got 10 x worst!! !! Thank goodness the pdoc saw AS was present just after 3 sessions!! ! When we started treating the behaviour regarding AS principles...it got much better....but we still make plenty of use of Dr Green advice in "explosive child" book......
The other things that I saw played a role was, definitly hunger, and tiredness!!
Also, SI issues, especially regarding planning issues...he knows what to do , like getting dress, but have problems going over in action....so he needs verbal cues, for example, put down the toys now and stick your head through the whole...., when he gets going its fine...The other day I left him to finish getting dressed...he went to the toilet quickly...when I went looking for him he was sitting on the side of the bath, pushing the bathplug in and out and got stuck...but IMO this is NOT ODD....this is ASD....
The other night my husband asked him to stop scootering in the house, he looked at my hubby laughed and carry on...This IMO was ODD behaviour, but then it changed to laughing from my son and I realized that he is misinterpreting my hubby facial expressions as being funny (he was angry) and thought it was a game!

It's one thing to read about this kind of behaviour, but when this happens in real life, it feels like torture!

i had not thought about my own oppositional behavior as a child until this thread brought it up. in school, i always did opposite of what i saw other kids doing. when in adolescence my so-called peers were starting to chase girls around, i took the opposite tack of "girls=germs" and i wouldn't have anything to do with them. i was gay but this was besides the point, i just didn't want to conform to what the other kids were doing and expected of me, i could not be caught dead conforming to others' expectations. if it was a hot day, while the other kids were wearing shorts and tees i'd force myself to wear warm bundled clothing and i'd be sweating bullets but i'd be complaining about how cold it was. rock music was popular so i took pains to be seen listening to some old folgie "beautiful music" station on the radio, and hum along with the old timey tunes, a practice which continues to this day. everybody else had 70s-era long hair so mine was a pig shave [this was my dad's doing as he was ex-military and kept telling me, "your head was MADE for a butch!"]. everybody else wore "mod" [early 70s] clothing including bell bottoms/flared leg pants, colorful tie-dyed t-shirts et al, but i [again my dad's doing] wore plain straight-legged pants and drab button-down long-sleeved shirts. everybody else spoke street slang but i used rigorously correct diction and grammar. the list goes on and on. i still hate to conform to what the people around me are about.

I think you make a good point about the difference between oppositional type behaviors that are stressed or sensory induced, v those that are truly oppositional. When my son gets stressed out his first reaction is to try to seize control over his world; he can't deal with the hopelessness he feels in the situation. Trying to change the result seems to give him some sense he has still has meaning or purpose. He doesn't even know he is doing it. While it appears oppositional it is, in fact, an entirely defensive reaction, so treating it as a discipline issue would be inappropriate and counter productive.

But, sure an AS child can be ODD as a co-morbid, or simply as a personality. I just don't think it is as common as it looks on the surface.

That's exactly the way my daughter has been. She was diagnosed with Aspergers and ODD, but I think the defiant behavior is really a consequence of stress best understood through AS. That's why I was so relieved by the AS diagnosis. It provided a framework for understanding those stresses. Once I stopped focusing on her misbehavior and began to see why she was so unhappy, it sometimes became easier to navigate those problem areas.

Auntblabby......could you maybe tell us why you did this opposing behaviour? Or is it just because of a feeling you get in your tummy that propells you? Why I ask is because I would like to understand my son better......believe me...he does get his direct opposing moments.....and I started to get the feeling that the motivation behind this is to just see my expressions or reactions!! !!

hiya LB
i suspect i am [or was] nothing like your son, that is all i am prepared to say about your son. my standard suggestion is to love your child to pieces, but it must be said that some children on the spectrum react curiously to love. some can't comprehend love in the first place, and i was one such child. i didn't get [comprehend] the concept of love until late in adulthood. i can only decode my own behavior in retrospect- at the time, i just had a subconscious/unconscious [what's the difference between the two, btw?] drive to not be like my so-called peers, and i can only guess in hindsight that it was because i knew they were high social status, smarter than me [i was in special ed most of my elementary school years], better looking than me, much more athletic than me, much more popular than me, i could see that their parents respected them much more than my parents ever respected me, the list goes on and on. my struggling battling parents always kept my hair pig-shaved. this was the era of long hair for males so i felt like an ugly outlier all the time. i was clumsy, ugly, gawky, ungainly, tripped over my tongue, couldn't tell a joke or story to save my life, lacking all social graces, in short with absolutely no appealing characteristics to endear me to anybody. so to at least get negative attention, i did what all neglected people and social groups do, and that is be troublesome. one can be actively thuggish or one can be passive/aggressive, and since i was such an inept physical joke i could only choose the latter option. i was angry and envious of the existential advantage the other kids all had. it was a case of "i wouldn't join any club that wouldn't have me." IOW if my so-called peers would not abide me, i would not abide them. i could not conform even if i wanted to, so i actively reacted against what other kids were doing. you can see the same phenomenon at work in some inner-city communities where people of color ostracise certain highly successful folk among them, by dismissing them with the epithet, "acting white." anyways, there was no element of defiance to adults, i was too much of a wimp for that. but i was always getting paddled and yelled at for this or that, and in that respect i was the scapegoat that took attention from the other misbehaving kids. i wasn't aware of much of this thought-process at the time, maybe as a unconscious psychic self-defense measure to keep me from succumbing to depression, due to the fact that my childhood was not a loving one. i was just a clueless kid. but depression came later in adolescence and adulthood in any case.
i hope this answer makes sense.

Thanx auntblabby for being brave and sharing this with me.....It sounds as if you worked through some of it and became a stronger person? If so....well done! That makes you a very successfull human being!

^^^
prego

I would have a learning assessment done. He could have some type of learning disability and these children can feel forced into a corner when they are presented with doing work they struggle with because they don't always have the skills to articulate their difficulties, or they try to explain but no one listens.

He could just be too tired and cranky to think straight though.